2,000 Influenza Virus Genomes Now Completed
and Publicly Accessible
Information Critical to Developing Treatments
and Vaccines
The Influenza Genome Sequencing Project, funded by the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), one of the
National Institutes of Health (NIH), announced today that it has
achieved a major milestone. The entire genetic blueprints of more
than 2,000 human and avian influenza viruses taken from samples
around the world have been completed and the sequence data made
available in a public database.
“This information will help scientists understand how influenza
viruses evolve and spread,” says NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni,
M.D., “and it will aid in the development of new flu vaccines,
therapies and diagnostics.”
“Scientists around the world can use the sequence data to compare
different strains of the virus, identify the genetic factors that
determine their virulence, and look for new therapeutic, vaccine
and diagnostic targets,” says NIAID Director Anthony S. Fauci,
M.D.
The Influenza Genome Sequencing Project, initiated in 2004, has
been carried out at the NIAID-funded Microbial Sequencing Center
managed by The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) of Rockville,
Maryland. Recently, growing sequencing capacity has enabled the
production rate to increase to more than 200 viral genomes per
month. Eclipsing today’s milestone of 2,000 genomes, the microbial
sequencing center will continue to rapidly sequence more influenza
strains and isolates and will make all the sequence data freely
available to the scientific community and the public through GenBank,
an Internet-accessible database of genetic sequences maintained
by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at
NIH’s National Library of Medicine, another major contributor to
the project.
Seasonal influenza is a major public health concern in the United
States, accounting for approximately 36,000 deaths and 200,000
hospitalizations each year. Globally, influenza results in an estimated
250,000 to half a million deaths annually. Seasonal flu shots are
updated every year to target the latest strains in circulation.
Developing such vaccines is challenging, however, because the influenza
virus is prone to high mutation rates when it replicates, and these
mutations can alter the virus enough that vaccines against one
strain may not protect against another strain.
An even greater concern is the potential for an influenza pandemic
caused by the emergence of a new, highly lethal virus strain that
is easily transmitted from person to person. Influenza pandemics
have occurred three times in the last century, the most lethal
of which was the pandemic of 1918, which caused an estimated 40
to 50 million deaths worldwide.
“A few years ago, only limited genetic information on influenza
viruses existed in the public domain, and much of the sequence
data was incomplete,” says Maria Y. Giovanni, Ph.D., who oversees
the NIAID Microbial Sequencing Centers. “The Influenza Genome Sequencing
Project has filled that gap by vastly increasing the amount of
influenza sequence data and rapidly making it available to the
entire scientific community. Subsequently, there has been a marked
increase in the number of scientists worldwide depositing influenza
genome sequence data into the public domain including scientists
at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention.”
Along with NIAID, TIGR and NCBI, other collaborators on the project
include the Wadsworth Center of the New York State Department of
Health in Albany, NY; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
in Atlanta; St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, TN;
the World Organization for Animal Health / Food and Agriculture
Organization of the United Nations (OIE/FAO) Reference Laboratory
for Newcastle Disease and Avian Influenza in Padova, Italy; Ohio
State University in Columbus, OH; Children’s Hospital Boston; Baylor
College of Medicine in Houston; and Canterbury Health Laboratories
in Christchurch, New Zealand.
More information about the Influenza Genome Sequencing Project and
access to the influenza virus sequence data is available at
To help analyze and interpret the large quantity of sequence data
generated by the Project, NIAID has funded the BioHealthBase Bioinformatics
Resource Center, which is being developed by researchers at the University
of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas and developers at
Northrop Grumman Information Technology’s Life Sciences division
in Rockville, Maryland. This Center provides the scientific community
with bioinformatics and software tools and a robust point-of-entry
for accessing influenza genomic and related data in a user-friendly
format. BioHealthBase has recently established a collaboration with
the Influenza Sequence Database at Los Alamos National Laboratory
to provide influenza researchers with computational data management
and analysis resources to assist in interpreting the genetic data.
Data from the Influenza Genome Sequencing Project, as well as all
other publicly available influenza sequence data, are also available
through NCBI’s Influenza Virus Resource, which includes a host of
analysis tools, such as sequence alignment and building “trees” that
show evolutionary relationships.
More information on these databases and other influenza data analysis
tools can be accessed at BioHealthBase
Visit PandemicFlu.gov (http://www.pandemicflu.gov/)
for one-stop access to U.S. Government information on avian and pandemic
flu.
NIAID is a component of the National Institutes of Health. NIAID
supports basic and applied research to prevent, diagnose and treat
infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted
infections, influenza, tuberculosis, malaria and illness from potential
agents of bioterrorism. NIAID also supports research on basic immunology,
transplantation and immune-related disorders, including autoimmune
diseases, asthma and allergies. News releases, fact sheets and
other NIAID-related materials are available on the NIAID Web site
at http://www.niaid.nih.gov.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) — The Nation's
Medical Research Agency — includes 27 Institutes and
Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services. It is the primary federal agency for conducting
and supporting basic, clinical and translational medical research,
and it investigates the causes, treatments, and cures for both
common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and
its programs, visit www.nih.gov. |
